Gibson shrugged. "We can only eliminate the least likely alternatives and accept the simplest one remaining."

"Then we can eliminate this one now," Farrell said flatly. "It entails a thousand-year voyage, which is an impossibility for any gross reaction drive; the application of suspended animation or longevity or a successive-generation program, and a final penetration of Hymenop-occupied space to set up a colony under the very antennae of the Bees. Longevity wasn't developed until around the year 3000--Lee here was one of the first to profit by it, if you remember--and suspended animation is still to come. So there's one theory you can forget."

"Arthur's right," Stryker said reluctantly. "An atomic-powered ship couldn't have made such a trip, Gib. And such a lineal-descendant project couldn't have lasted through forty generations, speculative fiction to the contrary--the later generations would have been too far removed in ideology and intent from

Reviews

This is another of Dee's Bee stories (like Pet Farm, written under his Aycock pseudonym.) The Bees were insect-like aliens who invaded human-settled worlds and experimented with the humans they captured. Then they abruptly left.

A survey ship looking for Bee-mutated human colonies comes across an impossible human colony that immediately attacks them as they try to land.

It is well enough written, but basically just a puzzle, without much plot or character development.

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